


Tethered

by hedera_helix



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Eruri Secret Santa 2017, Gen, M/M, sailor erwin, sea god levi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 13:50:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13125033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedera_helix/pseuds/hedera_helix
Summary: When the sea had settled, he walked along the soft, white shore and wrapped the calm around his body like a shirt; for this, too, was how he loved the sea. With no particular aim or purpose he wandered, his feet falling in time with the gentle song of the waves that kissed the sand and adorned its brow with garlands of weeds and drift wood. A blink of an eye between this storm and the next. A breath to be caught, a moment of rest – becalmed in his vast blue world.But he came upon a man.





	Tethered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seitsensarvi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seitsensarvi/gifts).



> My gift to seitsensarvi for the eruri secret santa 2017.

The clouds called for a storm. They made a solid ceiling of blue and grey that the sea mirrored in colour and soon in agitation when he raised the waves to a rage. From the depths he watched his world grow restless, the wealth of water around him swayed and bended as he willed it, soon feeling like an embrace in the deep; a soothing back-and-forth as if he was still in the arms of his mother, back at the dawn of time. But he knew the line where the unfathomed ocean met the boundless sky above him was as unsettled as he himself was unruly, forcing mountains of water to crash upon themselves, white snowcaps of froth and foam blown apart by gales and scattered to the winds. And he rejoiced, for this was how he loved the sea; a mirror to his own wildness, his restless wander, aimless but purposeful in its anger. The ocean hummed around him: a lullaby to soothe him. And the waves followed.

When the sea had settled, he walked along the soft, white shore and wrapped the calm around his body like a shirt; for this, too, was how he loved the sea. With no particular aim or purpose he wandered, his feet falling in time with the gentle song of the waves that kissed the sand and adorned its brow with garlands of weeds and drift wood. A blink of an eye between this storm and the next. A breath to be caught, a moment of rest – becalmed in his vast blue world.

But he came upon a man.

Lifeless and lost, hair and lips blanched by that realm he had no part in, skin burned and peeling under the merciless sun this sailor lay there, feet tethered to the water. Drawn by the sea that held the man’s breath, he kneeled down by his side and saw that the man was a wonder to behold. Touching him, he felt the depths on the man’s skin; an endless embrace, cold and unyielding. His spirit no longer resided in the flesh that had been carved into Their likeness but which now in his eyes, as he beheld the man, rose above in beauty and measure.

And his heart filled with the unknown – with longing, and with regret.

He’d never before cast his thought upon the sailors lost to his storms. Never before had he mourned over their lives that to him seemed the length of a single breath. But the man’s empty hands raised within him a sadness that rivalled the tempest that had carried this lifeless form to his feet.

Twining around his fingers, the man’s hair was brittle like the salt-crusted reeds that sway with the gentle breeze and snap when hit by gales. His unseeing eyes were the blue of the calm sea. Once unclothed by hands first-time clumsy, his body held the now hopeless promise of strength beyond his mortal measure.  

He felt the pain that once had been forbidden to his form, and it lent speed to the slow rhythm of his heart, made it thrash and flutter in his chest like a thing untamed and as unruly as the sea. It warmed his body which for countless ages had been as cold as the sailor’s had grown, and he felt death upon the man more strongly with the new-found warmth in his hands.

Casting his gaze back toward the calm-blue waves, he thought of the years he had wandered these shores, growing unknown to the people who once served him, raising his storms to keep them from their homes; and his existence felt foreign to him. The choice came upon him swift and clear: the purpose he’d never had, the reason he didn’t know he had searched for. It burned in his mind as a blinding light that made him forget the embrace of his mother, the centuries of wine poured over his altars, the sound, the scent, the taste of the deep ocean he once called home.

Bending down upon the man, he pressed his mouth, laden with life, onto his lips, which were as coarse as the jagged rocks of a distant coast, ever refusing to be softened by the sea. He breathed the salt from his body, drew out the death from the depths of his eyes with the agelessness he’d been given when Time had only just started its endless count.

Shame came in and filled the spaces left behind by unending life. Searing and swift, it made him know nakedness and wish to hide it, made him regret undressing the man and forcing this shame on him. Water was no longer his home, so he watched the man wake from behind the rustling reeds, making a secret of his new desire.

The sea left the man in a wave, the tethers on his feet released their hold. He rose, skin of white sand and broken shards of seashells. Stumbled; such perfect ungracefulness. Kneeled on the shore and wept; what unknown depths this mortal life could hold. The sailor closed sand into his hand and let it trickle down from between his fingers. The wind that blew across the bare bones of the land caught it and carried it over to the reeds where it caressed his hidden body and set a beat to his new mortal heart; the first grains of sand through the hourglass.

He watched the man gather up his clothes and move to shelter – watched, but didn’t follow. By the time the first of the evening stars returned to the sky, he was gone. The night brought new pains and longings: the cold, hunger, a need for rest. He slept in a sun-warmed hollow by the reeds, listening to the wind as it made them rustle and sing. He rose with the sun, found the wind-swept footprints left behind by the man, pressed the soles of his own feet into the shallow valleys in the sand to be closer to him, to know his mind, to know which roads he would choose – but much knowledge had left him when he’d breathed life into the man, and he soon found he did not know where to go.

At night he came upon a harbour he’d once avoided for he didn’t care for the way it caged in the sea. He clothed his body with stolen garments, damp and carrying the scent of the waves they’d caught from the wind. He went wherever he heard men speak and filled his mouth with their words, jagged and rough and strange, like sea ice upon the northern shores that breaks through rock and sets its traps for the unwary. And all the while he looked to find that blanched and brittle hair. And every new sun set upon his disappointment.

Until a day came when he saw him standing on the sea-cage, staring out toward the horizon; a beacon, though he did not know it.

For the day he was the man’s shadow, and as night fell he followed him to a tavern, where he found the man changed from the new life he’d breathed into him. It had given him a yearning for the sea, for a home he couldn’t know and had never had. The man’s name was Erwin – he whispered it again and again in his mind, so often he could feel it in the hollow of his throat; it sounded to him like waves caressing an unknown shore. Erwin had a ship, and what had once been a mere thing for him to play with now became his temple.

“I need to join your crew.”

He sounded ugly and foreign then, like stone scratching stone, like a vessel dragging its hull across rocks to its death.

“Do you know your way around a ship?”

Erwin’s words were round and smooth – like pebbles, centuries kissed by the sea.

“Of ships I know nothing,” he told the man, his teeth like crags beyond the shores of his lips, “but there’ll never be a man alive who knows more of the sea.”

“What is your name, sailor?”

And he thought then of all the names he’d been given during his ageless migration by seafarers and fishermen and hunters of seals and whales – of names no one now remembered and he himself had forgotten the sounds of. He gave himself a new name then and called himself Levi, so all would know he no longer lived only for himself but that his life was tethered to another, pulled towards another like the tide pulls the sea.

And he soon found the ship was Erwin’s temple, not his, and he bent his head in silent worship, never asking for anything but giving thanks for every moment shared. At night he poured his rations of grog into the sea and whispered Erwin’s name under his breath, let the wind catch it and prayed it would carry his words to caress the man, like the sand that had fallen through the man’s fingers had once caressed him. He guided the ship past harm and hurt until there was no room in his heart for other things; they became to him mere distractions from his purpose that remained, as his nightly whispered prayers: Erwin, Erwin.

Looking out toward the sea, the man once told him his eyes were the colour of the storm, the same wild iron that raises itself against mankind and cuts them down without mind or mercy. Levi thought then of how his will had once pulled sailors to their graves, how his temper had been like a sword used without skill or grace, and he felt shame but no regret. For Erwin, with his eyes of the calm sea, was the one who brought him home, to a body both broken and first-time alive, to the certainty that this was enough: to be ever on Erwin’s side, to ever wish to be the salt fringe upon his distant shore.


End file.
